I know scientists and, uh, not necessarily. In addition, someone who has penetrated your networks can also make hash of all but the most paranoid offsite backups.
Even in situations where everyone is attempting to share as much as they can, there will be delays until experiments are finished and the data checked any analyzed. (Which is something of an irony here: it’s possible that researchers working from stolen data will get an advantage, but it’s also possible they’ll go down a bunch of wrong tracks that they would have avoided if they’d waiting for more-vetted sharing.)
I don’t think there’s an immediate effect, or a severe one in the long term. Worldometer/Johns Hopkins/etc. have been relying on state and local information directly (through county/state dashboards, etc.) The CDC has separately been collecting data, and in a normal world that would have been that; but what drove all these independent estimates was the refusal of the administration to let the CDC do a proper reporting job on those statistics.
The states and hospitals can continue to report this data the way they have been. What I worry is that a few states will use the new process as another excuse to weaken their reporting, and exert pressure on counties to do the same. Hospital data (admissions for COVID) seems among the most vulnerable, since there are so many for-profit entities in the mix.
Ultimately you can’t cover up the statistics, but it’ll probably introduce delays and extra uncertainties. Trump and his advisors no doubt hope he can brazen his way through November in that fashion, but I doubt anyone in his cabinet understands exponentials properly.
I try to comfort myself that they are that stupid because the alternative is so much worse - that they just don’t care.
BTW, thank you for your response. I feel a little better but I suspect they are going to start cleansing the data by figuring ways to subtract deaths which I believe are already undercounted.
